Nomura plots Unique pubs sale

Guy Hands: reportedly given Kinski 'blank sheet of paper' in business review

By Damian Reece

12:01AM BST 01 Jul 2001

GUY HANDS, the head of Nomura International's principal finance group, is plotting a £1.3bn sale of the Unique Pub Company, one of Britain's biggest licensed estates, after he launched a strategic review of the operation on Friday.

The review is being led by Mike Kinski, the former chief executive of Stagecoach who joined Hands at Nomura earlier this year as the director charged with co-ordinating Nomura's diverse range of investments. Kinski will begin the review tomorrow. Unique's management, led by Giles Thorley, was informed of the review this weekend.

People close to the situation say that Hands has given Kinski a blank sheet of paper to review the business and come up with recommendations, which are expected to include a sale.

It was stressed last night that Hands is also interested in exploring the possibility of buying a brewing business to combine with Nomura's pub estate in a vertically integrated beer business. That would hark back to the days of the national brewers who owned vast estates of pubs tied to their breweries and beer brands.

Analysts believe, however, that there will be no shortage of potential buyers for the business, which operates 3,200 pubs and which has been one of Nomura's most successful investments. Companies likely to be interested in buying Unique include Enterprise Inns, Punch Taverns, Pubmaster and a host of venture capital groups eager to enter the pub market.

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It is thought that Hands is weighing up a bid for one or more of the four breweries belonging to Wolverhapton & Dudley. The Midlands brewer has said it intends to reduce its brewing sites. It is also the subject of a hostile bid from Pubmaster which has said it will sell W&D's brewing arm if its offer is successful.

Hands could also pick up breweries from Bass Brewers, which was bought by Interbrew but is now the subject of a prolonged investigation by the Office of Fair Trading.

The Government recently relaxed the Beer Orders, regulations introduced in 1989 to restrict vertical integration in the beer industry and which forced the national brewers to sell off thousands of pubs to new, independent pub companies.

One person close to the situation said: "Unique has been Nomura's flagship pub company for the past three years and it has done very well. Guy is sending in Mike Kinski to have a fresh look at it not because there is any problem but because it is time for a strategic review."

Another option open to Hands is to sell some of Unique's pubs as a managed estate rather than tenanted houses and use the proceeds to buy a brewery to integrate with the remaining tenanted estate.

Nomura is now Britain's biggest pub owner having recently completed the £625m purchase of 981 pubs from Bass, bringing the total number of houses under its ownership to 6,000, some 10 per cent of Britain's total. Hands, who is preparing to leave Nomura later this year, is likely to want to know how interested potential buyers are in Unique before deciding its future.

There have been numerous large pub sales in the past two years, including Allied Domecq's £2.7bn sale to Punch Taverns and Whitbread's recent £1.6bn sale to Morgan Grenfell Private Equity.

Other active buyers have included Enterprise Inns, which recently bought pub estates from Scottish & Newcastle.